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Zsuzsanna D Ihar is a researcher and writer who works across garrison towns, disused army bases, reclaimed conservation areas, as well as former weapon testing sites, examining the impact of the military on natural, (psycho)social, and intimate worlds. In her ethnographic project, “Natural Nation - Cultivating a Post-Extractive Azerbaijan”, she examined the coalescing forces of environmentalism and militarism in contemporary Azerbaijan. Ihar is a GATES scholar, as well as a recipient of the CHSTM fellowship. She recently published in The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Duke University Press, 2022).

For issue #37, we adapt an excerpt from Ihar’s paper “Properties of War: The Militarization of Housing Policy and Urban Planning in Contemporary Azerbaijan”, published in the Catalyst Journal. In this extract, Ihar explores the historical background of the Karabakh issue and the plight of internally displaced people (IDPs) in Azerbaijan, emphasizing the complex relationship between homemaking, territoriality, and militarism. 

The "Karabakh issue" has a considerably lengthy and complex history. Some trace it back to the Russian annexation of the region in the early nineteenth century, whilst others reference the period following Stalin's death when Armenian discontentment began to be voiced in public forums, leading to violent clashes in places like Stepanakert and Yerevan (Zürcher 2007). There were claims of a sustained "Azerification" of the region throughout the 1980s, with Azerbaijan's Communist Party General Secretary Heydar Aliyev accused of increasing the influence and number of Azerbaijanis living in Nagorno-Karabakh while at the same time pressuring its Armenian population to emigrate. This would eventually lead to a series of protests and mass meetings of an organized Armenian movement at the tail-end of 1987.  A year and a half later a national movement among the Azeris had formed in "response" to continued Armenian mobilization (Yamskov 1991) and by the autumn of 1989, it had attained an equal size and level of organization. These two competing national movements edged closer and closer to full-scale war, with Operation Ring — a heavy-handed attempt by Moscow to intimidate the Armenian populace and force them to give up their demands for unification — providing the final spark in 1991. 

As a result of the first Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, between 750,000 to one million ethnic Azerbaijanis were expelled from their homes in and around Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia (Najafizadeh 2013; de Waal 2018). As of December 2019, roughly 651,458 people retain status as either refugees or Internally Displaced People (IDP) (IDMC 2020) in Azerbaijan, with many still residing in dilapidated public buildings and ad hoc settlements. The precarious living situation of IDPs is predominantly due to their temporary residence status, which prevents registration for both property rights and land tenure outside of Nagorno-Karabakh (IDMC 2010). Additionally, some IDP fear that registration of legal title would result in the loss of IDP status and associated benefits. The absence of proprietary relations to urban space reifies the commonly held belief that most IDPs associate the city with a sense of unhomeliness.

The position occupied by IDPs fixes the concept of the home to the originary homeland, which simultaneously legitimates military investment and a logic of territorial expansionism. The blurring between home on the scale of the intimate and that of the national is evident in the colloquial Azerbaijani term for homeland, dede baba yurdu — meaning, "the home of one's grandfather." The term reflects the traditional Azeri belief that one's spiritual and ancestral ties are rooted to the earth itself, forging a direct relationship between displaced communities and the forests, mountains, and animals of Karabakh (Watts 2013). Such ties are reproduced in patrimonial fashion, further blurring the line between a primordial sense of homemaking and a masculine military culture. Indeed, both domesticity and militarism rely upon the establishment of proper male claim to land. Yusif, a soldier with familial roots in occupied Aghdam province, said to me, "the homeland is a man's first and true home. He may build many houses all over the world, but his home will always be where his father was born and where he lived. It is a man's duty to protect this home before anything else, by any means necessary." This line of thinking is evident in government rhetoric, with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev attesting to the primacy of Karabakh as "the land of our ancestors," which can only be reclaimed via the "professionalism, heroism, technical capacity, and sense of patriotism" of Azeri servicemen (President of the Republic of Azerbaijan 2021).

As part of a ceasefire agreement signed in 2020, large swathes of territory in Nagorno-Karabakh are in the process of being returned to Azerbaijan. However, soldiers are finding that much of the recovered land is uninhabitable, with both parties responsible for unfurling a "carpet of land mines" that will take decades to identify and remove (Kuzio 2021). Ali, an IDP from Qubadli described feeling "terrified" of seeing the scale of destruction firsthand: "to see houses looted and graves desecrated...in our minds our villages are frozen in time...they haven't changed for the decades we have been gone...to return and see it all changed...would completely destroy us." For Ali, returning to a home that no longer exists in a recognizable and familiar (or even inhabitable) form risks an entirely new form of traumatization. In the confines of memory, free of militarism and violence, the home of the past can remain.

Critiquing the necessity of return also allows for a more diverse conceptualization of domesticity, as well as an appreciation of the homes created in the makeshift settlements of Baku. For the IDPs I interviewed in the Black City (Qara Şəhər) neighbourhood of Baku, the informal and semi-legal nature of the settlements fostered feelings of "liberty" (azadlıq), freeing them from exhausting bureaucratic processes and lingering anxieties. Indeed, one will rarely encounter a resident in the settlement who pays property taxes. Water and electricity are regularly siphoned from networks, cloaked by thorny flora and the overflow of illegal arrangements. Government workers sent with eviction notices turn back in defeat, discouraged by barking stray dogs and the matting of camelthorn. There is a homemaking that occurs without bureaucratic intervention and supervision, where agency and resourcefulness coalesce. It is a far cry from depictions of the IDP population in state policy reports and media accounts as disempowered and passive.

In many ways, the decision made by IDPs to remain willingly and intentionally in a so-called wasteland forges a politically charged form of inhabitation. My friend Arzu, the daughter of an IDP from Aghdam province, spoke of her makeshift home with fondness and pride. Her attachment to the domestic space was not one filtered through a sentiment of nationalism or patriotism, but an awareness of the "effort" and "work" entailed in its creation. She could see the labor and the love of her family in each "window frame hammered together" or "sheet of scrap metal" collected to assemble her bedroom. Since the family house was constructed entirely with the use of found material, and without the assistance of a construction crew or developers, an intimate signature was inscribed into every nook and cranny. It wasn't a home dependent on the campaigns of a hypermasculine military, nor the funding of a semi-authoritarian state. Instead, it was quietly assembled from the debris of post-extraction, capable of still yielding purpose and use. The makeshift construction disrupted the relationship between the maintenance of territorial integrity and the process of homemaking; one did not need violence to earn the right to inhabit. Instead, values of resourcefulness and attentiveness were prioritized. The value system of many IDPs centered upon a sense of "hereness" rather than a nationalistic turn towards an idealized former homeland.

During my time in the Black City, I was privy to several emergent counter-movements, which seemed responsive to the peripherality of the space and the sense of non-representation in mainstream housing policy. While some of the younger residents living in the settlement expressed support for both the military and nation-state, there was a sense of productive opposition, particularly among second generation IDPs. Alongside contesting traditional forms of homemaking, younger IDPs had a habit of questioning other conventions of society, particularly those pertaining to early marriage and conservative family models. According to Arzu, there was growing skepticism surrounding the necessity of armament and the amount of state resources invested in defense.

For IDPs like Arzu there was also growing doubt around the homogeneity of Armenian populations. Indeed, for Arzu, respecting one's home was equated with respecting one's neighbor. Throughout our conversations, there was a sense that homeliness relied upon forging good relations with the "other" or those deemed to be the "enemy." One couldn't feel at home without expanding the sphere of consideration beyond kin or nation-state, to those deemed to be outside of it. Being a good host, for Arzu, was a central tenet to homemaking and home-keeping. These values were echoed by Mohammed, the son of another IDP from Agdam, who added that hospitality was central to Azeri culture, more so than "military might," rendering the animosity felt towards Armenians as "strange and, ultimately, paradoxical."

The un-fixedness of IDP domesticity—the fact that it often bears no paper trail, nor does it conjure nationalistic attachments to land and soil—seems to be the quality that elicits the greatest apprehension from the state. On both a practical and an ideological level, it has the capacity to cause problems for bureaucracy. Amidst the logistical chaos of the first exodus of IDPs from Nagorno-Karabakh in the 1990s, state and private companies often neglected to check the legal status of properties, allowing residents to forge "shadow" infrastructures—linking their makeshift homes to existing electrical grids and water lines. Wires, pipes, and necessary tools were shared among neighbors, as the wastelands generously yielded scarce resources. The commoning of materials harked back to a socialist "economy of favours" (Ledeneva 1998, 2), within which informal practices and informal relationships functioned as integral components in the upkeep of economic, political, and everyday relations (Sayfutdinova 2015).

In the contemporary context, such relations jeopardize the monopoly of the state on housing, infrastructure, and governance, inviting alternate ways to inhabit the industrial zones of Baku (Safiyev 2015). The economy of favors amongst IDPs has led many to reject the monetization of resources and a dependence on municipal services. Furthermore, it has created a fracture between the IDP community and the rest of the nation-state, rendering the makeshift settlement a space apart, with its own systems, beliefs, and values. This split is particularly risky for the Azeri state, which aims ultimately to impose its militaristic ideology on all spheres of social and political life. The makeshift settlements foster the emergence of an IDP identity not bound to victimhood or military allegiance. Rather than being casualties or children of war, IDPs emerge as resourceful inhabitants of post-extractive spaces, capable of establishing stable communities in informal and often difficult environments.

Notes: 

de Waal, Thomas. 2002. "Reinventing the Caucasus." World Policy Journal 19 (1): 51-59. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40209790.

IDMC. 2020. "Azerbaijan: Displacement associated with Conflict and Violence." Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. https://www.internal-displacement.org/sites/default/files/2020-05/GRID%202020%20–%20Conflict%20Figure%20Analysis%20–%20AZERBAIJAN.pdf.

Kuzio, Taras. 2021. "Mines, Karabakh and Armenia's Crisis." New Eastern Europe, April 15, 2021. https://neweasterneurope.eu/2021/04/16/mines-karabakh-and-armenias-ccrisis/.

Ledeneva, Alena. 1998. Russia's Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Najafizadeh, Mehrangiz. 2003. "Women's Empowering Carework in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan." Gender & Society 17 (2): 293-304. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3594693.

Sayfutdinova, Leyla. 2015. "Negotiating Welfare with the Informalizing State: Formal and Informal Practices among Engineers in post-Soviet Azerbaijan." Journal of Eurasian Studies 6 (1): 24-33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euras.2014.08.002.

Safiyev, Rail. 2015. "Informality in a Neopatrimonial State: Azerbaijan." In State and Legal Practice in the Caucasus: Anthropological Perspectives on Law and Politics, edited by Stéphane Voell and Iwona Kaliszewska, 133-148. Farnham: Ashgate.

Watts, Vanessa. 2013. "Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!)." Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2 (1). https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/19145.

Yamskov, Anatoly N. 1991. "Ethnic conflict in the Transcaucasus." Theory and Society 20(5):631-660. DOI:10.1007/BF00232663.

Zürcher, Erik.  2007.  The Buddhist conquest of China : the spread and adaptation of Buddhism in early medieval China.  Brill Leiden.

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